Most city dwellers view gardening as a quaint, if labor-intensive, hobby. Food cultivation is an honorable profession best left to big business and a few stubborn family farmers. But rising fuel and food costs, as well as increasing concerns about food safety and quality, have made the idea of growing your own grub as appealing as just-picked Indiana sweet corn.

Jon Richardson and Katy Schouge's garden dominates their Meridian-Kessler yard and generates enough food that "we haven't bought vegetables in months," Richardson said. The psychologist earned a biology degree and worked on biodynamic farms in New England before enrolling in graduate school. When the couple bought their house, he began planting. "I like the idea of being as sustainable as possible on a small city lot," he says.

The Richardsons grow a variety of veggies in addition to tending three apple and two cherry trees in a 20- by 60-foot space. "I think next year it's going to spread into the side yard," he said. The couple may be an extreme example, but they're not alone.

"I get around the neighborhood quite a bit on my bike or walkin'," says Eastsider Kay Grimm. "I see more and more little gardens poppin' up." Grimm lives on a multiple-lot property teeming with native plants and heirloom fruits and vegetables. She sees farming on this mostly abandoned block adjacent to the Indiana Women's Prison as a form of community activism.

In addition to growing food, Grimm provides locally produced products to members of Basic Roots Community Foods, her community-supported agriculture co-op, or CSA. It's a perfect business for Grimm, who grew up with five siblings on a farm that produced enough food to feed the family during the growing season and beyond. "I'm more comfortable talking with farmers than I am other people."

The urban farmer began cultivating her lot in the mid-'90s. By 2005, she had become frustrated at what she said was a lack of access to locally grown food on Indianapolis' Near Eastside. "I talked about five other people into going in on (the CSA) and started buying bulk," she said. But after nine months of buying organic produce from a local supplier, Grimm realized that what she really wanted was locally grown food. It's easy to understand why as she walks through her yard, picking white peaches so tender and juicy that they make mass-produced food taste like damp cardboard.

Today, Grimm has a statewide network of growers who supply her CSA. "I don't think (local food is) a trend that's going to go away," she said. "It's just a good time to be a farmer, I tell 'em."

Love of the land

It's a good time to be Todd Jameson. The part-time trade show consultant farms professionally, but food is more than a paycheck to him. "I don't paint, I don't sculpt, but growing things is my form of art," he said.

The co-owner of Balanced Harvest Farm grew up in the garden and never really left. On his native East Coast, he learned the old-world techniques responsible for making New Jersey "the Garden State."

Jameson explains those techniques as he bends over to pull clusters of radishes out of the ground. "You never want to take soil that was used to grow cabbage and immediately replant it with something in the cabbage family," he said. "We also maintain a rotation between root crops, leaf crops and fruiting crops."

This method of farming maintains soil quality and increases annual yields. "We're making very efficient use of the land that we have, just under two acres -- and it also confuses the insects," Jameson said.

The former executive director of the New Jersey Flower & Garden Show moved west to become president and CEO of the Indiana Flower & Patio Show. Jameson and his wife, Kathleen, had tended raised-bed gardens in their backyard for years. When the opportunity arose to cultivate a nearly-two-acre spread owned by an acquaintance on West 131st Street, the couple jumped on it.

When asked how much his plot produces, Jameson munched some purslane (a savory flowering weed) and said, "I don't really track in terms of pounds. We tend to look at the number of families that we can supply food for." Each week Jameson supplies 48 CSA members with six to 12 varieties of fresh produce. In addition, he makes regular visits to farmers markets in Indianapolis and Carmel.

Demand is the key

Small-scale growers like Balanced Harvest and CSAs like Basic Roots may be thriving, but Tia Agnew thinks that the local foods movement will take off only if the market demonstrates demand outside of farmers markets and boutique groceries.

"There's a lot of demand (for chemical-free food) but it's dispersed," said the owner of New Day Meadery in Elwood. "Growers need to know that there are larger buyers out there." Agnew and her husband, Brett, make wine from honey and fruits like peaches and blueberries. The couple buys honey by the ton, and fruit 500 to 750 pounds at a time from local conventional growers because they haven't found a chemical-free grower who can supply those quantities. But Agnew is confident that small-scale chemical-free farmers will grow quickly, like their business did.

When Brett began keeping bees several years ago, the couple soon had a surplus of honey. Both longtime foodies, the couple knew that honey could be used in winemaking, so they began experimenting. "We had no intentions initially of this ever becoming a business," she says.

In 2004, the Agnews turned their hobby into a full-time pursuit. They secured an old filling station in Elwood, retrofitted it as a food production facility, and secured necessary permits. New Day Meadery made its first commercial sale in 2006.

Over at Traders Point Creamery, former farm boy Markham Frohlich is as comfortable among the cows as he is among herds of students at IUPUI, where he is an associate professor of operations management at the Kelley School of Business. Frohlich serves as a member of the farm's board of directors but works alongside the full-time farm hands.

Opened in 2003 by Dr. Fritz Kunz and Jane Elder Kunz, Traders Point is the first organic-certified dairy in the state. Not much more than a thick stand of trees separates Traders Point Creamery from advancing urban sprawl, but the property is positively pastoral. Part farm, part production facility, and part restaurant, Traders Point offers a vision of a future where modern technology and ancient farming wisdom work in harmony.

The farm's herds live on pastures, where cows live out their natural life span and bulls, not used for breeding, are kept four to five years before slaughter. The herd's milk is bottled on-site and used to make a variety of award-winning yogurts and cheeses that are sold at the Trader's Point store, as well as in grocery stores around the region.

Because dairy production is so labor-intensive, Frohlich doesn't believe that part-time growers will be able to commit to making milk. But, he believes that the rising cost of transporting goods will lead to "a return to small to mid-size producers."

Increasingly, those small to mid-size producers are located in and around major cities. Which, strange as it may seem, is nothing new. "If you look back not too long ago, Indianapolis was a major vegetable-producing area," Jameson said. "We had the skills and the land and the environment to feed Indianapolis just 80 years ago, 75 years ago."

Growth experiences

Want to eat local but don't know where to start? Here are a few easy tips to help you get your learn on.

Get online

Going Local (www.goinglocal-info.com) dishes the dirt on all things related to local foods in Indiana: events, delivery services, recipes. The author of the blog, Victoria Wesseler, who lives on a mini-farm in Lebanon, spearheaded the state's first Going Local Week, which wraps up Sept. 6.

The Indiana Organic Gardeners Association (www.gardeningnaturally.org) is a valuable asset for growers who are still green behind the ears.

Get to a library

"Homegrown Indiana: A Food Lover's Guide to Eating in the Hoosier State" offers the who, what, why, when, where and how of Indiana eats as well as leads on restaurants that serve parochial produce. (Find more info at www.homegrownindiana.com).

If you want to turn your patch of grass into an edible Eden, the co-owner of Balanced Harvest Farm, Todd Jameson, recommends "Square Foot Gardening" by Mel Bartholomew (www.squarefootgardening.com).

Get dirty

Go to farmers markets and develop a relationship with the people who feed you. If you want to learn how to grow crops, Kay Grimm of Basic Roots Community Foods suggests you volunteer your labor. "You come out and help (a farmer) a little bit, and they're willing to teach you a lot of stuff," she said.

Local foods: Do they cost more?

The local foods movement sometimes is criticized as a fashionable hobby for people with money to burn. "That's bull," said Tia Agnew of New Day Meadery. "Good, clean food is a basic human right."

But an informal Indy.com survey of several staple foods at a farmers market, a natural foods store, and supermarkets in low-income and high-income neighborhoods showed a price gap:

It found that local produce will set you back 25.percent to 50.percent more than conventional produce, and locally produced meat, dairy, and eggs cost 50.percent to 100.percent more than factory-farmed products.

"The American commercial food system has been subsidized for so many years, people aren't aware of the true cost of their food," said Todd Jameson, owner of Balanced Harvest Farm in Carmel. He noted that as grocery bills grow, the price difference between mass produced food and local alternatives shrinks.